There have been a couple of new cases filed in federal court in California alleging that unknown BitTorrent users committed copyright infringement and engaged in civil conspiracy by trading porn files online. [Read about some earlier, ongoing cases of this type here and here]. The court has issued orders that move the process of uncovering the identities of the John Doe defendant BitTorrent users.

Generally a plaintiff cannot start the discovery process in a case until it has had a “Rule 26(f)” conference with the defendant. But when the defendants are anonymous (as they are in these BitTorrent cases — they’re known only by IP address), the plaintiff has a bit of a problem. It needs discovery to find out the names of the defendants, but it cannot take discovery before the Rule 26(f) conference. [More on this]

So in cases like this, a plaintiff will ask the court to allow the early discovery to be had. Courts grant those motions allowing early discovery when good cause has been shown.

In this case, the court allowed the discovery because the following four criteria had been met:

(1) The plaintiffs had identified the Doe defendants with sufficient specificity that the court could determine that the defendants are real people who can be sued in federal court. On this point, the court credited the list of IP addresses associated with each of the unknown defendants.

(2) The plaintiffs recounted the steps taken to locate and identify the defendants. Again, the court looked to the fact that the defendants were known only by IP addresses. The names of the defendants could not be ascertained from the information available.

(3) The plaintiffs demonstrated that the action could withstand a motion to dismiss. In some cases this is a tough hurdle to get over. But in copyright cases the threshold can be met relatively easily — simply alleging ownership of a copyright and unlawful copying satisfies this element.

(4) The plaintiffs proved that the discovery was likely to lead to identifying information that will permit service of process. Getting the subscriber information from the ISPs would allow names to be associated with the IP addresses, for further action to be taken.

So ISPs across the country will be getting peppered with more subpoenas, and sending out letters to their John Doe subscribers, giving deadlines to move to quash the subpoenas. More mad scramble to protect identities is on its way.

One of the craziest things about the copyright infringement lawsuits that have been brought against BitTorrent users accused of trading movies over the internet is the vast number of John Doe defendants that are usually lumped into one case. After the plaintiff copyright owners file a complaint for infringement — sometimes against thousands of anonymous defendants — they ask the court for leave to take expedited discovery. Then the movie companies serve subpoenas on the John Does’ internet service providers, asking the ISPs to disclose the identities of their customers associated with particular IP addresses.

Prosecuting a case against thousands of copyright infringement defendants is an enormous task, both for the plaintiffs’ attorneys as well as the ISPs who must respond to the subpoenas. Having so many defendants risks making the case unmanageable. So one may question whether it is appropriate under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to have so many unknown defendants all in the same case. In the nomenclature of civil litigation, the question is whether the joinder of all the defendants in one action is appropriate.

In three of the BitTorrent copyright cases pending in federal court in Washington DC brought by the US Copyright Group on behalf of a handful of independent film makers, groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the ACLU and others argued improper joinder. These organizations filed amicus briefs in the cases of Call of the Wild Movie v. Does 1 – 1,062, Maverick Entertainment v. Does 1 – 4,350, and Donkeyball Movie v. Does 1 – 171, arguing that joining all the defendants in one action violated Rule 20 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. The court rejected these arguments, finding that joinder was proper, at least in such early stages of the litigation where the defendants had not yet been identified.

The court considered three factors when answering the question of proper joinder: (1) whether the claims arose from the same transaction or occurrence or series of transactions or occurrences, (2) whether the legal and factual questions are common to all defendants, (3) and whether joinder would cause prejudice to any party or needless delay.

Same transaction or occurrence

The court observed that claims against joined parties must be “logically related,” and that this is a flexible test, with courts seeking the broadest possible scope of action. The court held that the claims against the BitTorrent users were logically related, based on plaintiffs’ allegations that the BitTorrent protocol makes every downloader of a file also an uploader, and accordingly, every user who has a copy of the infringing file on the network must necessarily be a source of download for that infringing file. This is an interesting finding, in that the strength of plaintiffs’ allegations were based on how BitTorrent works.

Common legal and factual questions

As for this second factor, the court found that the legal and factual questions were common because the parties would be litigating the same copyright claims, and all of the claims related to the use of BitTorrent.

Prejudice or needless delay

The court said some intriguing things about the interests of the parties in making its findings on this factor. For one, it said that leaving all the defendants joined in the same action would benefit them all, in that they would be able to see the defenses that other defendants were making. The court also expressed concern in favor of the efficiencies afforded the plaintiffs in filing these mass lawsuits. The plaintiff movie studios have been criticized for filing suit against large numbers of defendants in one action rather than separate suits against each defendant (and thereby having to pay only one filing fee to start the action versus several thousand filing fees). The court saw this question squarely in favor of plaintiff. It found that forcing plaintiffs to administer multiple actions, and having to pay the filing fees in all those actions “would certainly not be in the ‘interests of convenience and judicial economy,’ or ‘secure the just, speedy and inexpensive determination of the action.'”

Happy Thanksgiving. I’m grateful for your continued support and interest in Internet Cases. It truly is a pleasure to write these posts and to get your feedback and engagement. And it’s also a pleasure to bring you news of this ultra-timely new copyright lawsuit.

Greenberg Smoked Turkeys, as you might expect, sells turkeys. Since 1987 it has distributed these turkeys with some simple instructions, comprised of three short paragraphs. You can read these instructions which are embedded in the complaint. It posted these instructions on its website in 2003.

Some time thereafter, Greenberg alleges, its turkey selling competitor copied the instructions and began using the instructions on its own website. Thus this lawsuit.

Infringement claims over instructions can be a tricky endeavor. In copyright law, there’s something called the “merger doctrine.” This relates to the idea-expression dichotomy: ideas are not copyrightable but their expression is. Simple instructions or directions may not pass this threshold: in their simplicity, they may be expressing something in the only possible way. That kind of expression does not rise to the level of copyrightability.

In mass copyright infringement cases against alleged traders of copyrighted movies via Bittorrent, unknown defendants had no reasonable expectation of privacy in their subscriber information held by internet service provider.

Several unknown “Doe” defendants who were sued for copyright infringement for trading movies via Bittorrent moved to quash the subpoenas that the plaintiff copyright owners served on the defendants’ internet service providers.

The subpoenas sought subscriber information such as the defendants’ names, addresses and MAC addresses, so that they could be named as defendants in the copyright litigation.

Defendants moved to quash the subpoenas, arguing that their subscriber information was private information that should not be disclosed pursuant to a Rule 45 subpoena. The court denied the motions and ordered the subscriber information produced.

The court held that the defendants did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their subscriber information held by the internet service providers. It cited to a number of cases that supported this holding, each of which had found that a person loses his or her expectation of privacy in information when that information is disclosed to a third party. See Guest v. Leis (6th Cir.), U.S. v. Hambrick (4th Cir.), and U.S. v. Kennedy (D. Kan.).

In footnotes, the court also addressed the potential First Amendment rights that the defendants would have to engage in anonymous file sharing. It quickly dispensed with any notion that such activities were protected in this case, as the pleadings on file set forth a prima facie case of infringement. “[C]ourts have routinely held that a defendant’s First Amendment privacy interests are exceedingly small where the ‘speech’ is the alleged infringement of copyrights.”

FragranceNet.com sells perfume online. It sued several of its competitors, claiming trademark infringement and other causes of action like unfair competition and unjust enrichment, over the defendants’ alleged purchase of variations of the term “fragrancenet” to trigger sponsored links on Google results pages. These sponsored links allegedly drove traffic to defendants’ websites.

The defendants moved to dismiss the complaint. Had this case been filed a year ago, the defendants may have argued that the case should be dismissed because the purchase of keywords to trigger sponsored links was not “use” of the marks. But in light of the Rescuecom decision from this past spring, defendants were constrained to argue differently.

They claimed that the case should be dismissed because the purchased keywords are generic terms and therefore not protectible as trademarks. The court rejected this argument, holding that it was inappropriate to determine whether the marks are generic at the motion to dismiss stage because plaintiff had adequately stated plausible trademark claims in its complaint. The question of genericness is better considered with some actual facts.

In moving to dismiss claims brought against it for trademark infringement and false designation of origin under 15 U.S.C. Secs. 1114(1) and 1125(a), Indiaweekly.com, LLC claimed that the counterplaintiff Nehaflix.com had failed to allege sufficient facts to meet the standard of Fed. R. Civ. P. 9(b). That rule requires that “[i]n alleging fraud . . . a party must state with particularity the circumstances constituting fraud . . . .”

The U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut rejected Indiaweekly.com’s assertion that such claims were subject to Rule 9’s heightened pleading standard. Nehaflix.com’s allegations that Indiaweekly.com placed Nehaflix’s trademark on Indiaweekly.com to draw in search traffic survived the motion to dismiss. It was plausible that potential Nehaflix customers, when searching for the term “Nehaflix” would, upon being directed to another site containing the term and selling competing goods, conclude that the two businesses were related when in fact they were not.

It is important to note that the court assumed for the sake of the motion to dismiss that the allegations that the Nehaflix mark “appeared” on Indiaweekly.com meant that the mark was visible when viewing the site and not merely in metatags. The court nodded to S&L Vitamins v. Australian Gold, Inc., 521 F.Supp.2d 188 (E.D.N.Y. 2007), which held that mere metatag use was not “use in commerce” for purposes of the Lanham Act.

CNET News is running a story about how Jerry Scroggin, the owner of Louisiana’s Bayou Internet and Communications, expects big media to pay him for complying with DMCA takedown notices. No doubt Scroggin gets a little PR boost for his maverick attitude, and CNET keeps its traffic up by covering a provocative topic. After all, people love to see the little guy stick it to the man.

Here is something from the article that caught my attention:

Small companies like [Bayou] are innocent bystanders in the music industry’s war on copyright infringement. Nonetheless, they are asked to help enforce copyright law free of charge.

A couple of assumptions in this statement need addressing. I submit that:

ISPs are not innocent bystanders.

As much as one may disdain the RIAA, the organization is enforcing legitimate copyright rights. Though an ISP may have no bad intent to help people infringe (i.e., the “innocent” part), infringing content does pass through their systems. And few would disagree that the owner of a system is in the best position to control what happens in that system. So unless we’re going to turn the entire network over to a government, we must rely on the ISPs at the lower parts of the web to comply with the DMCA. They owe a duty. It’s in this way that the ISPs are anything by innocent bystanders in the copyright wars. In fact, they’re soldiers (albeit perhaps drafted).

Though the administrative burdens of DMCA compliance fall on the ISPs, the work is not undertaken for free.

The safe harbor that ISPs enjoy in return for compliance is a huge compensation. An entity in the safe harbor has more certainty that a suit for infringement would be unsuccessful. Were there more doubt about the outcome, there would be more litigation. More litigation equals more cost. And I guarantee you that those litigation costs would dwarf the administrative costs associated with taking down content identified in a notice. So substract the administrative costs from the hypothetical litigation costs, and there you have the compensation paid to ISPs for compliance.

Silver Ring and Digisplint are competitors in a niche industry, each producing and selling fine jewelry quality finger splints made of gold and sterling silver. Silver ring sued Digisplint for copyright infringement alleging that Digisplint copied text from Silver Ring’s 1994 catalog, and posted that text on Digisplint’s website.

Before trial, the court awarded summary judgment to Silver Ring on the question of liability for copyright infringement. The question of damages proceeded to trial. Finding that “nearly identical and very similar text comprise[d] substantial portions of both [works],” and that the similarities were “obvious and persuasive,” the court awarded Silver Ring $30,000 in statutory damages pursuant to 17 U.S.C. §504(c)(1). It found that Digisplint’s copying was willful, and although Digisplint reaped no profits from the infringement, the award was to serve as a deterrent to future conduct of the sort.

Digisplint had filed a counterclaim pursuant to the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA) over Silver Ring’s registration of digisplint.com. The court found in favor of Digisplint on this claim, and entered an injunction against any further registration of a confusingly similar domain name. But because Silver Ring registered the domain name in 1998, prior to the enactment of the ACPA, Digisplint was entitled to no money damages, only an injunction.

It’s always a bit nerve wracking to write about decisions when I know that counsel of record is probably going to be reading the post. That’s the situation with the recent Designer Skin v. S & L Vitamins case. Law blogger Ron Coleman (whom I consider a friend though we’ve never met) is defense counsel in the case, and he has been a longtime supporter of Internet Cases with encouragement back when I started in 2005, and with frequent links to here from his blog Likelihood of Confusion.

Ron’s good reputation is in apparent proportion to his lawyering skills, as his client S & L Vitamins was largely victorious in summary judgment proceedings in a trademark infringement matter before the U.S. District Court in Arizona. The case exemplifies a modern issue concerning the use of trademarks on the Internet.

Plaintiff Designer Skin sells indoor tanning products. Designer Skin is pretty selective about who it allows to resell its goods. Defendant S & L Vitamins – a web-based reseller – is not on Designer Skin’s list of permitted resellers. But S & L sells the products anyway. And it gets traffic to its website in part by using Designer Skin’s trademark in metatags, in page HTML, and as a keyword to trigger sponsored search results.

The court ascertained that Designer Skin was arguing initial interest confusion based on (1) S & L’s use of Designer Skin’s marks in metatags, HTML and as keywords, (2) higher placed search results (presumably because of the metatags and use of the mark in HTML), and (3) the appearance of Designer Skin’s marks on S & L’s web pages.

The first argument – said the court – misstated the law. The mere fact that S & L used the marks in this way was not enough for initial interest confusion. Missing was the notion of “bait and switch”. The court emphasized that “[d]eception . . . is essential to a finding of initial interest confusion.” When web users clicked on links to S & L’s pages which indicated Designer Skin products were being sold, they were taken to pages which, not deceivingly, sold Designer Skin products.

The second argument for initial interest confusion failed essentially because it wasn’t plausible. Even if Designer Skin had presented evidence (which the court found it hadn’t) that S & L was showing up higher in search results for “Designer Skin,” only “the naive few” would be deceived. And fooling any less than an appreciable number of users would not be enough for the claim to survive.

As for the third argument, the court found it impossible for initial interest confusion to arise based on what appeared on the site. A searcher could not be tricked into initially visiting a site by the look of the site itself – by that time he or she would already be there.

In short, the court held that because there was no deception on the part of S & L, there could be no initial interest confusion. S & L was using Designer Skin’s marks to truthfully inform searchers what they could find at the S & L site – authentic Designer Skin products.

A couple of days ago David Donoghuewrote about the recent case of Nordstrom Consulting, Inc. v. M&S Technologies, Inc., No. 06-3234, 2008 WL 623660 (N.D. Ill. March 4, 2008). Dave’s post gives a very thorough treatment of all aspects of the case, which involve primarily allegations of infringement of the copyright in software.

The case also involved a claim of circumvention under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, at 17 U.S.C. 1201(a). The court granted the defendants’ summary judgment motion on this claim.

The dispute arose from a rather typical set of facts. The parties had collaborated on the development of some software. Along the way the principal author of the software became dissatisfied and parted ways. Litigation ensued over the parties’ ownership and use of the source code.

Before plaintiff Nordstrom officially severed ties, he went on vacation. While he was gone, one of the defendant’s employees (Butler) sent Nordstrom an email saying that Butler needed access to the source code which was stored on a computer there in the office, in order to help out a customer. Nordstrom didn’t respond for several days, and in the meantime, Butler disabled the BIOS password for the computer.

Nordstrom sued under Section 1201 over this disabling of the password. The court relied heavily on the Federal Circuit’s decision in Chamberlain Group, Inc. v. Skylink Technologies, Inc., 381 F.3d 1178 (Fed. Cir. 2004) to conclude that there was no violation of Section 1201’s anticircumvention provisions.

The Chamberlain case draws a necessary connection between circumvention and infringement. And the presence of this connection is the vexing part of the analysis. A quick reading of Section 1201 does not reveal the link.

But the Chamberlain court held that Section 1201’s prohibition on circumvention does not give rise to a new property interest, only a new cause of action, one that goes after circumvention of methods controlling access to protected works. One can’t pursue a defendant just for circumvention in a vacuum, so to speak. The circumvention has to bear some “reasonable relationship to the protections that the Copyright Act otherwise affords copyright owners.” Chamberlain, 381 F.3d at 1202. In other words, without infringement or the facilitation of infringement arising from the cirumvention, a cause of action under 1201 does not arise. The linkage is one between access and protection.

The holding of the Nordstrom case as to the DMCA claim picks up on this link between access and protection. Summary judgment on the circumvention claim was proper because the plaintiff could not show that Butler’s disabling of the BIOS password protection on the computer storing the source code enabled any infringement. The evidence before the court was that Butler accessed the code to fix a problem on behalf of an authorized licensee of the software. Because of the license, there could be no infringement. Without any connection to infringement, under the teaching of Chamberlain, a cause of action for circumvention could not be sustained.

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Evan Brown is an attorney in Chicago helping businesses and individuals identify and manage issues dealing with technology development, copyright, trademarks, domain names, software licensing, service agreements and other matters involving the internet and new media.

Evan is a partner in the law firm of Much Shelist, P.C. He is an adjunct professor of law at Chicago-Kent College of Law, and is a Domain Name Panelist with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).